How much bandwidth is enough?
Okay. Schools back in session and we have 260 boarding students who just arrived with laptops, cell phones, iPods and iPads. It seems that every electronic device is now wi-fi enabled and causing congestion on the student’s network (segregated for this reason).
Over the past month, we have been having major internet outages in the dorms to the point where the modems were crashing. The student network can only be accessed wirelessly. Each dormitory is connected back to our “server room” via fiber to a switch that is connected to a firewall that has four WAN ports that provide WAN balancing in a round-robin fashion. Each of these WANs has an 18MB cable internet connection. The round-robin balancing act basically takes User1 and sends him out WAN1, User2 is sent out WAN2, User 3 through WAN3, User4 gets sent out WAN4. This process continues as User 5 is sent out WAN1 and so on and so on.
We have implemented various appliances to control protocols, block ports and filter web pages; however, we are still coming to a standstill after school lets out and the students go back to their dorms. We can check the logs and see that all of the appliances are working, ports are being blocked and protocols (especially bit torrent and peer-to-peer) are being blocked. We have replaced nearly every piece of equipment but the problem persists.
Comcast (our ISP for this network) is aware of the problem and have been to our campus numerous times to test the equipment and lines. All checks out fine… until school lets out.
Comcast finally has acknowledged that there is an issue. They are promising to run a totally separate node to our campus (and only for our campus) but time will tell. At this point, we can only assume that it is not the connection to the internet that is the problem but the amount of bandwidth that our students are consuming. Comcast has confirmed that we are peaking shortly after school lets out.
At this point we have very little option than to wait it out to see if Comcast follows through. Because we are about 30 miles away from our nearest POP, dedicated lines are very pricey if we were to look at 20MB+ lines.
Today’s internet is not the same internet as five years ago in terms of intensive websites and rich media. Is there a magic formula to compute number of users to what the minimum bandwidth should be purchased?
1 Comment
Hi Dennis,
I’m intrigued by the way you balance your WAN. We currently have one boost cable-modem coming in (5/30) and we’re preparing to increase that one to 20/100 and add three more additional lines in. We use iPrism as our sole content filter — it would appear you have multiple appliances for this?
Do you have an appliance that load balances? If so, what are the specs? We have 870 students — all wireless — all static IPs. And about 100 staff members – all static on the same over-crowded network.
Clearly we have a need for additional bandwidth and your system is the one I pitched to our admin team — if you could supply any details that would point me in the right direction to further fact-find, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks in advance.
Sue